McLaren LIVE

McLaren LIVE brings you the unique story of the McLaren Honda race team from inside the garage.

Keep up to speed on driver position and lap times throughout the race alongside a live feed of images and radio chat between the engineers and drivers. It updates continuously during every practice, qualifying and race session, bringing privileged access into the chatter and flow of the pit garage, delivering insights straight to your desktop, tablet or mobile. Your own on-the-move or second screen experience.

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Lewis Hamilton

The story of Lewis Hamilton’s induction into the McLaren pantheon has long been the stuff of legend: as a 10-year-old karter, Lewis approached Ron Dennis at the 1995 Autosport Awards and duly told him that he would one day drive for the McLaren supremo.

It says as much for Lewis’s conviction as it does for his talent that his promise came good.

After tearing through the junior categories under McLaren’s tutelage, including a barn-storming, take-no-prisoners 2006 season in GP2 under the increasingly watchful eye of the grand prix circus, he was perfectly primed to join Vodafone McLaren Mercedes for ’07.

Few would have fancied his chances against reigning world champion Fernando Alonso, but the Briton’s pace increased in step with his rapidly growing self-assurance. He bagged consecutive podiums from his first five races before scoring a memorable maiden grand prix victory in Montreal. He followed it up with a second win one week later at the United States at Indianapolis, beating Alonso in a straight fight. Hugely impressive stuff for a rookie.

While his challenge would falter almost within sight of the season’s finishing line (he finished second in the championship behind Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen), his debut season remains the most impressive and outstanding of any rookie in Formula 1.

For 2008, he went one better, attacking the season with vigour from the very start, racking up some of the most emphatic wins of his career in Monaco and at Silverstone – both in torrential conditions – and took the title, again following a downpour, on the very final corner of the final lap of the final race.

It was pure Lewis: drama played out to the highest stakes with all the skill and flair of an absolute showma

Throughout 2009, ’10 and ’11, the template remained the same, even if the machinery wasn’t quite as consistently fleet as those mesmerising opening two seasons: given a worthy car, Lewis would take it and deliver – time and time again.

If further world championships didn’t quite follow, his scattered victories were always gloriously opportunistic and, you felt, only achieved by somebody with his singular panache and commitment.